Vladimir Kara-Murza
Vice President at Free Russia Foundation
Sept 24, 2024
“There will need to be a genuine reflection, a genuine moral cleansing, including accountability for those who have committed war crimes in Ukraine. We will need to make sure that this evil never, ever comes back again.”
Our conversation with The Times. On prison, on sanctions, on the war — and on Russia after Putin.
Unfortunately the article is behind a paywall:
Putin’s demise could come when we least expect it, says freed dissident:
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Boris Nemtsov Place, London. I was in prison when it was designated in 2022. My most heartfelt gratitude to all the friends who helped us make it happen — especially then-Camden leader and now government minister Georgia Gould.
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On Friday, Mr Kara-Murza met prime minister Sir Keir Starmer and Foreign Secretary David Lammy – and he is now urging Western governments to give stronger backing to Ukraine.
He is pushing for the release of thousands of other political prisoners who are still being held in Putin’s jails.
Dissident in prisoner swap vows to return to Russia:
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“It’s not just the Russian people, in his view, who need to take collective responsibility but western leaders too, who “for all these years were buying gas from Putin, inviting him to international summits, rolling out red carpets”.
Our conversation with The Guardian.
Putin regime will collapse without warning, says freed gulag dissident
Vladimir Kara-Murza and his wife, Evgenia, speakof his time in a Siberian jail and why the truth about Russia will come out
From his Guardian interview:
“He talks about how, as he was taxiing down the runway of Vnukovo airport, the FSB agent sitting next to him told him to look out of the window because it would be the last time he’d see his country. “I just laughed in his face and said, ‘Look man, I’m a historian. I don’t only think, I don’t only believe, I know I will be back home and it’s going to be much quicker than you imagine.”
Amen to that VKM, amen to that.
“Unfortunately the article is behind a paywall”
I tried posting it (multiple times) a few days ago, but it was blocked. I just remembered that the banned word is L.i.b.e.r.t.y, so this should go through. Enjoy…
Putin’s demise could come when we least expect it, says freed dissident
Vladimir Kara-Murza, released from a Siberian jail in a prisoner exchange deal, says it is only a matter of time until his nation is free of the Kremlin’s oppression
As he stood alone in his tiny punishment cell in Siberia, serving the longest sentence handed down to a Russian political prisoner since Stalin’s purges, Vladimir Kara-Murza was certain that he would never see his wife and three children again.
A long-time opposition activist, Kara-Murza was arrested outside his home in Moscow in April 2022. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison on treason charges that were based on comments he had made about Russian war crimes in Ukraine, including during a speech in Arizona.
In late July, he was led from his cell in the middle of the night without explanation. A friend and ally of Boris Nemtsov, the opposition politician who was shot dead near Red Square in 2015, and Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader who would later die in an Arctic prison, Kara-Murza had survived two poisonings widely believed to have been ordered by the Kremlin. Now he feared the worst. “I thought I was being led out to be executed,” he said.
He had no idea that he was about to be set free as part of a prisoner exchange that also secured freedom for Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter who had been jailed for 16 years by Moscow on trumped-up espionage charges.
“Until six weeks ago I was sure that I was going to die in that Siberian prison,” Kara-Murza told The Times before a meeting with Sir Keir Starmer and David Lammy, the foreign secretary, in London.
When President Putin unleashed a crackdown on dissent at the start of the war, Kara-Murza, a dual British-Russian citizen whose family home is in Washington, could have fled Moscow. Instead, after a brief trip to the United States to attend his eldest daughter’s 16th birthday party, he flew back to Russia to make a stand.
Loathed by the Kremlin for his successful lobbying in Washington for the Magnitsky Act, under which the United States sanctions Russian officials involved in human rights abuses, Kara-Murza had sensed that his arrest was inevitable. Yet he felt he had no choice but to try and lead by example.
“How could I call on my fellow Russian citizens to resist Putin’s dictatorship if I didn’t do it myself, if I was sitting somewhere far away, in safety? This would be hypocritical,” he said. “Fear is a two-way process. It’s not enough for a dictatorship to try to instil fear in citizens. It’s also up to citizens, each individual person, whether he or she chooses to be afraid or not.”
Yet during his incarceration, he admitted, he was tormented by regrets over his decision to return. He was allowed short and infrequent phone calls to his family last year but these were stopped once he was moved to a new prison in January. Even if his wife, Evgenia, had been allowed to visit him, she could not travel to Russia over fears that she too would be arrested. His release date was set for April 2047, when he would have been 65, but he said that health problems caused by his poisonings meant there was almost no chance he would have survived that long in prison.
“As a human being, as a father, as a husband, you know, I regretted it every single minute of every single day that I was not allowed to call my kids, that I couldn’t hear my wife’s voice on the phone,” he said. “I thought that that was going to be for the rest of my life.”
He may be free but Kara-Murza has not forgotten about the thousands of political prisoners who remain locked up in Russia and Belarus, the Kremlin’s biggest ally in Europe. “For many of them, it’s not just a matter of unjust imprisonment, it’s a matter of life and death.” He said he had raised their plight during meetings since his release with President Biden and Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor.
The son of a Russian opposition journalist, also called Vladimir, Kara-Murza moved to Britain with his mother when he was a teenager. He studied history at Cambridge but returned to Moscow after graduating. While incarcerated in Siberia, he was made an Honorary Fellow of Trinity Hall in recognition of his bravery.
He also said he was proud of the Russians who continue to protest against the war, despite the risks they face. More than 20,000 people have been arrested across the country for opposing the war since 2022, and at least 300 protesters are behind bars, according to OVD Info, a human rights group. This week a Russian court sentenced a man to five-and-a-half years in prison for anti-war comments that he made to Radio Lib-er-ty, a US government-funded website, when it canvassed passers-by in Moscow for their opinions on the invasion.
“I mean, really, in these conditions, does anybody expect large numbers of people to speak out? I did and got a 25-year sentence in prison for it. I don’t think in any society you would find many people who would be prepared to pay such a price,” he said.
“[But] what amazes me, and frankly speaking, what makes me proud of my country, is that there are so many people who are doing this. There are tens of thousands of people who have openly protested against this war, despite the censorship, despite the repression, despite the fear.”
Kara-Murza was heavily criticised by Ukrainians after his release when he called on the West to carefully target its sanctions against Moscow to ensure that they hit Putin’s regime and not ordinary Russians, something he argued would only boost support for the Kremlin.
“I never called for annulling of sanctions. But they should be calibrated in a way that they target the Putin war machine and the Putin war economy and make it difficult and ideally impossible for it to continue conducting this murderous, aggressive war against Ukraine.”
Despite export controls, more than 30 per cent of battlefield products and more than 20 per cent of critical components sold to Russia between January and October last year came from companies based in the European Union or the US, according to the Kyiv School of Economics. A Russian cruise missile that hit a children’s hospital in Kyiv in July contained 28 western components, researchers said.
Since the start of the war, several European countries such as Lithuania and the Czech Republic have imposed blanket bans on Russians entering their countries, a move that Kara-Murza said was discriminatory and in violation of the European Convention of Human Rights. “That’s not how things should be done in the 21st century,” he said. “[The West] should not treat all 140 million Russians as war criminals, because that’s very obviously not the case.”
These may be the darkest days for Russia’s opposition movement, whose leaders are all dead, in prison or in exile, but Kara-Murza is sure that Putin’s regime will eventually collapse. “Political change in Russia usually happens suddenly, unexpectedly, when nobody sees it coming, and nobody is ready for it,” he said.
Yet he is concerned that if change does come, Russia could make the same mistakes as in the 1990s, when former servants of the communist regime, including Putin, an ex-KGB officer, were allowed to take up positions of power.
“This time, there will need to be a genuine reflection, a genuine moral cleansing, including accountability for those who have committed war crimes in Ukraine,” he said. “We will need to make sure that this evil never, ever comes back again.”
A good article. You have a Times sub?
You should get F1 to make you a publisher.